Some hope for school building projects - but row continues

12 Jul 2010

At education questions in the Commons this afternoon, the Education Secretary Michael Gove confirmed that - in the wake of the cancellation of  BSFprojects - there will be a review of future capital spending in schools.

He said that review will make an interim report  in a few months and a final report by the end of the calendar year.

 Junior ministers, Sarah Teather, added that "just because some projects have stopped under BSF, it does not mean they will not happen in the future".

Meanwhile, Mr Gove published what is now the 5th list of cancelled BSF projects. According to the Shadow Education Secretary, Ed Balls, it contains 20 more cancelled schools than the first list a week ago. He also claimed that a further mistake had been found in the latest list.

Repeating his claim that the BSF programme was wasteful and unnecessarily expensive, Mr Gove said one individual had received £1.35 million in consultancy fees from BSF. He did not name this person.<Stop Press: it now seems that Mr Gove also got this slightly wrong. The fees were paid to KPMG, and over 3 years, for work that was carried out one individual>.

He also failed to answer questions from Mr Balls about whether or not he had been advised to delay publishing the original list of cancelled projects, which later proved to contain several errors.

Instead of answering the questions, Mr Gove concentrated on attacking the Labour government's record saying that rather than an inquiry into the cancellation of the BSF projects he would like to see an inquiry into what went wrong under Labour.

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